Press owners and operators are constantly put in a situation where they are required to estimate the cost of printing a customers print job before it is printed. The customer wants assurances that the cost is acceptable, so that they have the ability to choose another print service provider if necessary. The owner wants assurances that the price they give is an accurate reflection of their cost so they can stay competitive while maintaining a profit.
Even pricing the cost of a job after it is run is extremely difficult. The only directly determinable costs are those of the substrate used. In practice, the most costly consumable is the toner (or ink) usage of the job. Unless the job is very large, where the toner can be measured in bottles, it is difficult to determine how much toner a specific job consumed.
Commercial products are currently available to estimate the toner coverage that a specific PostScript or PDF print job will require. These tools require the user to enter a coverage-to-cost factor to estimate the actual toner cost. The problem with these tools is that although they automate the estimation of toner coverage, they leave it to the user to determine an accurate cost factor. The cost factor is a very labor-intensive value to derive. For an accurate estimate, coverage must be broken down by intensity and consider the relationship of coverage and intensity to actual toner usage, which is not linear. Also, these tools do not take into account the substrate size, but only give a single area coverage value and assume the user is working with a fixed substrate size. For these reasons, these tools are very limiting since they require a significant number of manual calculations to be performed outside of the tool. At a minimum, press owners are required to track each job printed, the substrate size used and the toner consumption to allow them to estimate the cost of a specific new job. Even after a job is printed, unless the job is extremely large, there is no direct way to accurately determine how much toner was used. Realistically, the usual course of action is to take the weekly or monthly print volume and divide this by the total monthly toner usage. This kind of coarse estimate does not account for different substrate sizes or for differences in the toner lay-down (coverage-intensity information) of the specific jobs run.
An additional significant component of the cost of operating a press print job is the cost of the wear on the press. There is currently no product available that can automatically calculate the cost of wear on the press. Only service plans that provide a fixed per-page click charge provide a mechanism to determine a value for this cost. For service plans that are not based on a click charge, such as a NexPress press that allows the press operator to maintain and replace all components that are subject to wear, the cost of wear on the press is the cost of the individual wear on the complete set of operator replaceable components (ORCs) other than toner, that are required to be maintained for proper operation of the press. In a NexPress product, there are over 150 ORCs that contribute to the cost of running the press. The complexity of tracking this level of cost information manually is impractical.
For these reasons, there is a need for a system and method for determining a cost for a specific end user print job in an automated way that does not require extensive record keeping on the part of the user.